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Memorized Payee List is empty

Heather77

Hi,

I'm a longtime Quicken for Windows user (20+ years). I want to automate my categories, and I'm following directions to go to the Memorized Payee List, but this list is empty. I tried adding a payee, and it doesn't show up on the memorized Payee List. Any suggestions?

Thank you,

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Accepted answers

Boatnmaniac

@Heather77 - If you have not now already checked the box for Automatically memorize new payees, do so now and then click on OK. Then going forward when you enter Payees and categories into transactions they will be added to the Memorized Payee List.

You may also check the box for Remove memorized payees not used in the last XX months, if you wish. If you do not check this box your Memorized Payees will remain on the Memorized Payee List forever and that can make it unwieldy after a while. That's why I check the box and enter 24 months. Then Memorized Payees not used within the last 24 months will automatically drop off the list. It is a personal choice as to whether or not to check this box.

Did this resolve the issue for you?

All comments

Boatnmaniac

Edit > Preferences > Data entry and QuickFill:

Is the box for Automatically memorize new payees checked?
Is the box for Remove memorized payees not used in the last XX months checked with an inappropriate number of months entered?

Heather77

Thanks for responding! Neither of those boxes are checked.

Boatnmaniac

Did this resolve the issue for you?

Heather77

Hi @Boatnmaniac - Done - and, behold - the memorized payees are showing up now! A bit of a mystery to me why that worked, but delighted that it did. Thank you!

Heather77

Huh, I spoke too soon. They all disappeared again.

Heather77

And then reappeared again.

Heather77

I will chalk that last bit up to the Quicken gremlins. In any event, many thanks for your help.

nerdindenial

I am also a 20 year user who had a blank memorized payee list (even though over 5000 are memorized).

I only super-validate my 230MB data file - I never do just a plain validate. Apparently you need to periodically validate as well.

Here is what fixed the problem for me:

shift-ctrl-Tools→Memorized Payee List (this rebuilds the memorized payee list)

File→Validate and Repair File (took an unusually long time.do not super validate)

Now the memorized payee list is fixed (at least for now)

UKR

@nerdindenial said:

I am also a 20 year user who had a blank memorized payee list (even though over 5000 are memorized).

Are you saying that your MPL contains over 5000 entries?
How many of those are duplicates that could / should be merged into one? For example, to have a payee name = "Starbucks" instead of "POS TRANS 070119 STARBU", "POS TRANS 070219 STARBU", "POS TRANS 070319
STARBU"
Renaming Rules would help maintaining a trim MPL in the future.

How many of those over 5000 entries have not been used in several years and should be deleted?
An MPL with thousands of unused, unnecessary entries can turn into a performance hog.
Click Help in the Menu Bar. CTRL+click About Quicken and it'll give you an MPL count in a File Information window.
To trim the list and keep it in shape please do this:
In Edit / Preferences / Data Entry and Quickfill make sure you have a checkmark at
[√] "Remove memorized payees not used in [xx] months"
and set [xx] to something like "18". Do not set it to zero. IMHO, you should set the number to 12 or higher for best results, so that once-a-year payees don't vanish.
Restart Quicken for the change to take effect and housekeeping to clean up the Memorized Payee List.
Check the File Information box again to see the reduced count.

nerdindenial

Thanks; with 24 month pruning I am down to 1988 memorized payees.

124 accounts

407 categories

206756 K QDF file (after 25 years)

174/174 securities

61111 transactions.

This is on a Core i7-3770K PC with SSD drive and 32GB low-latency DRAM. Performance is good but when I finally get a new PC it should be substantially faster (5 GHz clock, larger cache, more DRAM, NVME drive). Though it's not clear to me whether Quicken has been re-architected to fully use multi-threading/SMP-safe, large RAM, etc.

Do you think I will be able to use this QDF file for another 20 years, with it maybe getting up to 400 or 500 MB in size?

I haven't wanted to split the QDF into multiple files because of corruption concerns and the fact that I sometimes sell assets purchased 10 or 20 years ago. Also performance is okay so I haven't seen the need.

The big surprise for me was that QDF Validation could fix problems that Super-Validation could not.

From that lesson, it seems that many users should try running BOTH validation and super-validation when they have problems?

UKR

During Year End processing, only reconciled bank transactions prior to the selected cutoff date are removed from your active data file. Investment transactions (buy, sell, etc.) are never removed, no matter how old.

Normally, it shouldn't be necessary to run Year End Copy unless activity in a certain register becomes too unwieldy or begins to noticeably slow down. I haven't run YEC myself since about 2016.

Validate and Supervalidate are two distinct programs within Quicken. They each process the file looking for different types of data file errors.
Quite often it's recommended to run both processes one right after the other. But, if there's an issue with the data file which neither Validate nor Supervalidate can fix, restoring from a backup taken before you first noticed the problem may be the only way out.

As to your MPL …
the more you can reduce the number of Payee Names floating around in your account registers, the better it will be for performance and for selecting the correct Payee Name when manually entering a new transaction. You shouldn't need more than about 100 MPL entries for your personal payees.
If you have many iterations of Payee Names that all basically say the same: You went to Starbucks for your morning coffee, but the transactions download with variations of "Starbucks" plus some store number or date or other cryptic text, different every day:
Use Edit / Find/Replace to find all variations of the Starbucks name and replace Payee Name with a standardized "Starbucks".
In the MPL get rid of duplicate "Starbucks xxxxx" entries and retain only one standardized "Starbucks" MPL entry.
Use a Renaming Rule to change newly downloaded transactions to "Starbucks" before they hit the register.